Odessa ─ Genius and Death in a City of Dreams

ODESSA was the Russian Empire's gateway to the Middle East, its greatest commercial seaport, and home to one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in all of Europe.

When Mark Twain visited, he found its mix of nationalities and religions-Jews and Russians, Ukrainians and Greeks, Italians and Germans-to be America in miniature. Created as a model of enlightenment by Catherine the Great and developed by colorful adventurers such as Grigory Potemkin, Jose de Ribas, and Armand de Richelieu, Odessa became a magnet for the artistic and the ambitious - from Alexander Pushkin and Isaac Babel to Zionist activist Vladimir Jabotinsky and immunologist Ilya Mechnikov.

Odessa's reputation for nurturing feisty dissenters, artful raconteurs, and good-natured crooks cemented its place among Europe's great cities. But in the twentieth century, pogroms devastated the Jewish community; the Russian civil war brought refugees and new rulers, the Bolsheviks; and during the Second World War, Romanian occupiers killed tens of thousands of Jews in one of the untold episodes of the Holocaust.

Drawing on a wealth of original source material, historian Charles King paints a rich portrait of Odessa through the lives of its geniuses and villains, revealing how a diverse, cosmopolitan city turned against itself during the Holocaust - a diaspora reaching all the way to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

Charles King lives in Washington, DC, where he is a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University. He is the author of four books on Eastern Europe, including The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus and The Black Sea: A History, and a frequent commentator on events in the region for television, radio, and the press.